Fear Sells (Corrections Cost)

Fear is a great sales tool. Politicians, of course, make good use of it. So do news outlets. The more scared you are the more you're paying attention, right? I mean, what's more attention grabbing, "snow expected" or "shotgun of snow takes aim at town"? The problem is that oftentimes the fear is nothing more than hype and the inevitable "never mind" becomes to little too late.

In that spirit, over at Reason they've cataloged the ten most apocalyptic cover stories from Time magazine over the past 40 years. While the journalism is pretty shoddy, the artwork is pretty neat in some instances. My favorite:


Looks like something off of a Zappa album cover.

To be fair to Time, tho', they were kind of right about Pokemon.